----- Original Message ----- From: "Adrian van den Dries" <avdd@flow.com.au>
May I respectfully ask why there is so much concern with such complicated setups? Surely a production environment (which is what any Zope distribution should aim for) will standardise on a software version?
I have this need - and what we do is *exactly* what you ask: we standardise on a software version, on service level. It seems (my impression) that most unix distros take the following view: one service, one machine. We often find that we need to run several versions of both Zope and Apache on the same machine at the same time; this might be because the current production version of a service needs to have some packages for apache/zope that conflict with newer versions of apache/zope, or simply because we do not want to change the environment for production services that work. I have created a buch of shell scripts that allows me to handle several versions of python and Zope on the same machine, as well as manage several INSTANCE_HOMEs. Each INSTANCE_HOME can specify which python to use, which zope to use and any extra stuff that is needed (like what Oracle envrionment it wants to run with, etc). I will have/have had to change these for both Zope 2.6 and for Zope 2.7 - but my hope is that with 2.7 I can just throw my scripts away and use the stock ones.
If the concern is because *developers* want to run multiple Zope instances on multiple Zope versions with multiple Python versions, then I would suggest writing an *alternative* mechanism for developers to mangle their PYTHONPATHs and whatever.
I find that solutions for production environments, in the style of the one oulined above, work very well for development environments as well. My 2 öre worth... /dario - -------------------------------------------------------------------- Dario Lopez-Kästen, IT Systems & Services Chalmers University of Tech.